Five shows to watch this week

Michelle Williams returns from hiatus to star as a dying woman on a journey of sexual discovery, Tom Hardy shines in Guy Ritchie’s dodgy new gangster show, and The Handmaid’s Tale (finally) comes to an end.

Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate in Dying for Sex

Dying for Sex
Disney+, from Friday April 4

Michelle Williams has returned from hiatus hellbent on reminding us how much her presence has been sorely missed. In Dying for Sex, she plays Molly, a New Yorker whose cancer took her sex life along with it — though, to be fair, it wasn’t much to write home about in the first place. When she’s told the disease is back, terminal this time, a palliative care nurse asks about her bucket list. It transpires that she’s never had an orgasm with someone else, so she does the sensible thing and dumps her dreary husband (Jay Duplass, so good as a likeable sad sack) and embarks on a spree of orgasmic abandon. The sex is deeply embarrassing and funny — think domination lessons that inexplicably feature the 2015 animated feature Minions (those giggling yellow beans from Despicable Me). Jenny Slate’s on hand as the irrepressibly loyal but chaotic best mate Nikki, and Sissy Spacek is excellent as Molly’s estranged mother. Based on Nikki Boyer’s podcast about Molly Kochan — who died one year before the podcast aired — and her final fling with life, it’s a wild, weepy dash to the finish line.

MobLand
Paramount+

Within the first 10 minutes of MobLand, there’s a nightclub knifing set to The Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up and a throat pulped under a foot. This could only be the work of Guy fackin’ Ritchie. His latest series, written by Ronan Bennett (of the vastly superior Top Boy) is classic Ritchie — brash, blood-slicked and star-stuffed. Paddy Considine, this week’s cover star Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, and the highlight, Tom Hardy, are all here — doing their utmost to keep a straight face while growling about “power” in accents which range from shaky to legally actionable. The plot? If you insist … Hardy pays Harry, fixer to the Harrigan crime clan, which is headed by Brosnan’s Conrad and Mirren’s Maeve. When their party boy son is spotted getting chummy with the rival Stevensons, Harry must intervene. It’s all very ridiculous, but if you like your gangland dramas flash and fun, you’ll manage.

Enlightened
Max

Max — formerly HBO Max — has finally washed up on Australian shores, toting its arsenal of prestige television. First order of business: checking out which long-lost gems have resurfaced. Grim tidings for Parade’s End fans — that starched, Tom Stoppard-helmed adaptation of Ford Madox Ford’s novels, remains as elusive as ever. But among the riches is Enlightened, Mike White’s corrosive, pre-White Lotus comedy that sparked the Laura Dern renaissance. If the new season of The White Lotus proves anything, it’s that White is at his very best when skewering spiritually derailed, high-net-worth white women. Enlightened is precisely that. Dern has too much fun with Amy Jellicoe, a corporate banshee whose affair with the boss ends in a career-immolating breakdown. After a Hawaiian wellness retreat, she returns to work reborn. Her employer disagrees and banishes her to the basement to work among the data nerds. There, she plots her righteous, delusional take-down. Too bitter and ahead of its time to last, Enlightened was canned after two seasons, but is due for rediscovery.

Big Boys Season 3 
ABC iView from April 18

Jack Rooke’s Big Boys has always been something of a miracle: a sitcom that is at once sentimental, filthy, profound and outrageously funny. Now, as it reaches its third and final season, it delivers a finale so devastating you’ll be gulping for air, a snivelling, snotty wreck in the glow of your laptop screen. For those unfamiliar, it follows Jack (Dylan Llewellyn, all dopey confusion), a newly out fresher still reeling from his father’s death, and Danny (Jon Pointing, extraordinary), an older student whose geezer exterior masks something much sadder. Their friendship is the heart of the show: two young men, both lost, who find solace in each other. But it’s not just about them. Rooke’s world is filled with gloriously mad women — Jack’s mum Peggy (Camille Coduri), whose daffiness disguises moments of true wisdom, and cousin Shannon (Harriet Webb), who this season, now with child thanks to a rendezvous with a delivery man, has got rich off a Bingo win. Big Boys has always juggled comedy and tragedy with astonishing ease, but this season is on another level. By the last episode, it is almost unbearably moving. Easily the best British sitcom since Gavin & Stacey — and at moments, possibly even better.

The Handmaid’s Tale
SBS on Demand

Two US presidents have come and gone since women first took to the streets in scarlet cloaks and white bonnets to protest against Trump. In the time it’s taken for The Handmaid’s Tale to reach its conclusion, he’s been booted from and crawled his way back to The White House, while poor Elisabeth Moss has been left to mope around Gilead. It would be a porky pie to say that I’ve kept up with the show — one can only endure so much ritualised suffering (a season and a half, tops). But for those with a stronger stomach, the final instalment of this Margaret Atwood adaptation will premiere exclusively on SBS this month.